[open-cobol-list] IS PUBLIC, IS PRIVATE, enhanced COPY

[Patrick]

Hi Everyone

It looks like my post "how does our community work" will go unanswered. 
It's not a big deal, it's just that I am not sure how to handle myself 
in the community sometimes. I want to post about something that might 
upset some people. Please everyone forgive me if I don't write this just 
the right way, it's hard to get it just right.

So as everyone can see I am still asking beginner/intermediate questions 
with Cobol itself. I would like to contribute to the source code of open 
Cobol but I will need some time before I am competent to do so. I have 
printed most of the source code in colour and I am reading through it 
when I can. It's very well laid out and my main problem is just trying 
to understand all of the volume of it.

A couple of years ago I tried to read the source code of Lua. Even 
though it is only 18K lines of code, I failed miserably.

I am not young, I am 37, have two kids, Wife, mini-van, mortgage and 
small business. However there are many people on this list that have 
been coding in Cobol longer then I have been alive.

I don't have much to offer the community outside of enthusiasm but one 
thing that I mighty be able to offer is a specific perspective.

I have only been programming for 8 years, part time. In this time I have 
learned or tinkered with over 20 languages. I really love Cobol but it 
was not until I had enough experience under my belt with other languages 
that I had the confidence to ignore what so many people were saying or 
accidental implying and give the language a real try. For those with 40 
years experience this might not apply.

One thing that chased me away for a few years was the enormous number of 
reserved words.

In this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7VcArS4Wpqk

Rob Pike, one of the Google Go language developers said that Go has only 
30 reserved words(or thereabouts) and that the number of reserved words 
is roughly proportional to the complexity of the language. With Cobol 
weighing in with about 300-400 reserved words, I thought this must be 
some sort of whacked language from the past.

It's my understanding that there are more lines of Cobol written then 
all other languages combined or at least this was the case fairly 
recently. However when I look around there is hardly any presence of it 
on the internet. Very few tutorials, very few bindings, little mailing 
list and IRC activity . Furthermore the forums seem like ghost towns and 
are riddled with trolls and such.

I bought 8 books on object oriented Cobol programming. I thought they 
would have the "latest and greatest" examples and best practices. I 
thought that once I was up to speed I might be able to help bring the 
project up to the 2002 standard. I have tried to read these books but I 
just end up skimming and putting them down again. I don't see much of 
any value that 2002 OO brings and worse it does not seem to have been 
adopted in a universal way and that Cobols' public relations failure was 
well under way by the time OO showed up.

These additions could give a mechanism to generate library code and 
ought to make me more productive with "advances". The things is, the 
more I want from the language, the more I just end up finding it in 
Cobol 85.

It seem to me that Cobol 85 is near OO already and is already a damn 
good language. The thing is that it was been hard for me to learn coming 
from experience with many other "modern" languages.

This has been a terribly long introduction but here is the potentially 
useful part......

What if I modified open Cobol to make it's goodness more accessible to 
programmers familiar with "modern" languages.

I am really loving sub-programs now. I now understand IS COMMON and IS 
GLOBAL. It's perfectly sensible to name them these names and have a more 
restricted scope as the unspoken default but it would have been so much 
easier for me to understand these concepts if the reserved words were IS 
PUBLIC or IS PRIVATE.

What is I modified open Cobol and made a friendly fork call Libre Cobol? 
If I synchronized it with open Cobol, could I freeload on the open Cobol 
list for advice?

I am thinking that a way to make the language more approachable for some 
people would be to add non-standard extensions to the language but add 
as little total code as possible.

One of my first ideas was to make IS PRIVATE a reserved word that does 
nothing, it's just the default. This would be similar to USAGE IS 
DISPLAY. I was thinking that if I made IS PUBLIC a synonym of IS COMMON, 
new people would know what it does right away.

I was thinking of creating an OO system that was just slightly more then 
what it already is in Cobol 85. For instance many languages have OO 
without classes, Lua, JavaScript, IO and even Ada(in a non prototypical 
way). Information hiding can be achieved in Cobol 85 and these other 
languages by  including programs/functions/procedures within other 
programs/functions/procedures. Most of these languages have reserved 
words to assist in defining scope as well.

There languages have more powerful module capabilities then we do and 
better ways to bring in library code so that it can be accessed through 
a clear dot notation( dog.bark()  ). We don't have this but I was also 
daydreaming about an enhanced COPY statement that would bring in 
multiple sub-programs. For instance COPY "ls ./dogLib/dog*" . The 
enhanced copy statement would bring in everything that a shell command 
returned. The new files(s) brought in would still have to be able to 
access files back in their old directory that were included as regular 
COPY statements, it might give a better library mechanism then just 
plain COPY.

Very long email..... but"

1)is anyone opposed to a friendly fork?

2)is "IS GLOBAL", the default setting and "IS COMMON" close enough to 
what people would expect from "IS PUBLIC", "IS PRIVATE" ?

3)would asking people to prefix their library name files with the 
library name "dog-bark.cob" be almost as good as using a dot notation?

Any general comments would be appreciated.

Thanks for reading my very long email-Patrick